The Next 2 Months for Badger DAO

With Badger turning a week old I felt it was fitting to share with the community where the core team believes the DAO should focus over the next 2 months. The intention is to gather your feedback, insight and suggestions then adjust accordingly. Much of these plans were put into motion prior to launch and altered slightly based on how fast we grew up.

Areas of Focus

  • Security, security, security
  • Structuring Operations
  • Evolving Sett Vaults
  • Launching New Product DIGG
  • Developing new products with ecosystem partners

Security

Security is the top priority right now. Although we’ve completed our initial audit of the core systems and smart contracts now it’s about the ongoing practice as we continue to launch new vaults and products.

To ramp up security I believe we should focus on 5 key pillars;

  • 3rd party audits - Complete 2 additional audits from reputable firms in the next 45-60 days which will focus on our vault product and rewards distributor. Having as many smart eyes on our contracts as possible is critical with the amount of capital currently in the system.

  • Establish a security advisory board/war room - This will be a group of specialized white hat hackers that work with us on a daily basis to review our systems, set up a foundation to be able to respond if a counter attack is necessary and advise on best practices. Intention is to have this setup for next week the latest.

  • Incentivized public peer review - Upon preparing to release new products, vaults, code enhancements etc. we should have incentives in place to reward those that participate in public peer review. This will ensure more secure products at launch while also engaging potential people that could get involved with operations moving forward.

  • Large bug bounty program - Instead of offering $50-100k for a bug and then if there is an exploit be willing to pay millions to get user funds back. Instead I believe we start with a bug bounty that’s very large (millions of dollars for the core system) and scale down based on how critical the issue is. This should not start though until we’ve received additional security audits.

  • Additional incentivized 3rd party smart contract protection - within 24 hours from launch through our partnership with Cover protocol, there was almost $3M in collateral deposited for additional coverage on our smart contracts. We need to have as much of this as possible so users feel comfortable using our contracts while also ensuring they are protected in case of an exploit. I believe we should collaborate with another established coverage partner like Nexus Mutual. Badger should incentivize through shield mining to build liquidity and collateral on that platform. This needs to happen in December.

Structuring Operations

With such explosive growth we need to ramp up our operational structure quickly. Being it that Badger is an open collective, we need to take best practices from other communities like ours (Yearn and Harvest) and put a structure in place that makes it easy for new community members to get involved and work their way through different parts of the operational ecosystem

To do that I believe we need to establish 5 key things;

  • Job Board - This would be for immediate fixed rate jobs that the DAO needs done. Ideally medium-large. The job board can span all areas of the operations (development, marketing, community, communications, product etc.) and I think could be a great place for any new comer to get started collaborating with a clear compensation structure.

  • Grant Program - To be used for compensating operations team monthly and in -frequent contributors. Example of the later is vFat who took it upon himself to build a separate interface for using the Sett products. He should be compensated for something like this and this would give someone like him/her the extra boost to get more involved. Operational expenses shouldn’t include the founding team that are being rewarded with Badger already.

  • Bounty Board - For smaller projects or tasks. Another great way for new community members to get involved quickly.

  • Product Board- Like a top 10 list of products the community wants to build. This can be a great attachment point for working with other protocols in the industry or a guiding light for communities members to build. All products will be incentivized through the developer mining program.

  • Contests - Harvest has seen quite a bit of success conducting frequent contests for different things like design, development, community participation etc. With the nature of contests I think we can attract different contributors than the areas above and promote fun community engagement.

Underneath this infrastructure are dedicated channels for effective communication and collaboration like our developer discord server. There should be Badger leads that onboard and act as a liaisons for all new contributors regardless of what level they are getting involved at.

We should have all the above established by next week to start engaging the community.

There are numerous early contributors that have showed interest in stepping up to take on lead roles and I intend to put a proposal forward next week with an outline of initial grant recipients.

Evolving Sett Vaults

A priority should be to introduce new vaults before DIGG launches. This will be a great opportunity to engage strategists from the community to participate with of course the added benefit of earning up to 50% of the performance fees from the vaults. It will also help attract new capital and partner collaborations.

These vaults should be focused on attracting the largest pool of untapped tokenized Bitcoin in the space, Sushiswap wbtc/ETH LP’s. Along with that we should introduce new liquidity pools for the Badger token to further support the ecosystem. Sushiswap would be a great place to do that. Our current Uniswap strategy has worked really well for increasing liquidity consistently (take 50% of Badger rewards and reinjecting them back into the LP position for the user) and I think we should do the same on Sushiswap. Also, Sushiswap has built a fix for the Uniswap router issue that pushes non wbtc Badger swaps through the ETH pool which is being arbitraged.

Currently both Badger and DIGG token are being considered for the 60 day SUSHI incentive program which would enable both these 2 new vaults + DIGG vaults when they launch to earn SUSHI as well. We should then maximize the return for that Sushi for users by staking it for xSushi which has a substantial APY. This further aligns Badger with Sushi as we prepare for launching DIGG. This would make our vaults very unique compared to others running Sushiswap strategies.

https://snapshot.page/#/sushi/proposal/QmcvdHzLsQ49dMEXi5VMykHYpgE3oVzCMNqGSbehATLmYg

As DIGG launches we most certainly should have supporting vaults when it goes live. That will be a key driver for increasing utility like we saw with Badger.

Finally, the community has made it loud and clear that we need to simplify our UI for the vaults. We should (and have been) focusing efforts on making the user experience smoother by removing the multiple tabs (stake, supersett, sett) and instead just having it in 1 place and a few clicks (deposit, deposit and stake, withdraw, withdraw and unstake).

Launching New Product DIGG

For those unfamiliar with DIGG, it’s a rebasing Bitcoin. The core team has already built this protocol and conducted an audit on it. I think launching in the coming weeks can really help keep momentum up for Badger while driving increased APY’s for our vaults and further developing the DAO’s treasury. Along with this it will better help the industry understand we aren’t just a vault product but instead the intention is launch a variety of Bitcoin oriented products.

There is an extensive forum conversation around launch parameters that details much of what the community thinks it should look like.

https://forum.badger.finance/t/digg-launch-parameters/209/74

Developing New Products with Ecosystem Partners

Badger is all about creating an environment for the best builders to come together and collaborate. We’ve created incentive models to ensure aligned interests for anyone that builds (% of revenue and earning from Badger developer pool 15% of total supply).

https://badgerdao.medium.com/badger-developer-program-3bf0cb2cc5f1

We need to start setting precedence with how this process can/should work. Collaborating with other ecosystem partners could be a great first step.

This is the purpose of the product board to have a rolling list of the top 10 products the community wants to build and that makes it easy to identify a point of attachment.

By having products that represent different parts of the stack in house (sort to say) it can do alot for how the system as a whole operates. There will be inherent efficiencies, less reliance on 3rd parties and better revenue potential.

I’ve spoken to a few teams interested in this and hope more and more of these progress in the coming weeks.

As mentioned in the beginning this is what the core team thinks the focus should be but this is a community run project and we need your feedback + guidance.

43 Likes

Thanks for that.

Security first ! This protocol is new, this protocol is successful, so this protocol is a target !

IMO, we should relax. There is a lot of interesting discussions, notably about emission, DIGG, new products. That’s super cool. But we should also take our time and structure the DAO before starting to go everywhere.

I understand that keeping the momentum is important, but building a solid base is also super important. It probably better to be too slow but be strong, than going too fast and collapsing in few months (i’m not saying it will happen :rofl:).

6 Likes

That’s an interesting idea - are there any cases studies of that?

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Not that ive seen, but it would be a good one in itself, basically its just switching it up from what has taken place so far. Harvest, pickles, etc.

I voted yes with my sushi

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Well thought out. As long as we have members looking out for where we need to develop then we’re good to go!

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yes! safety first $ 174M … exponential growth will attract unwanted actors, be prepared

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Congratulations on developing an awesome badger

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None in our space. After speaking with quite a few security experts with crypto domain expertise the consensus was this is a good idea. At the same time you need to go through multiple audits and deep code reviews before opening it up to something like that.

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Awesome, this would be super helpful :smile:.

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Amazing and in detail. I hope I have voiced my want to take on a lead role as well. I would be glad to do my part and then some. :slight_smile: great job with this road map for the next 2 months. Bravo

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Very interesting take on security end. Love that the richest conversation is occurring on the forum. Agree on engaging strategists. I see some of them from Yearn Talk discord hanging on Badger discord too. Capitalize on the incredible momentum created by the team and community with as you mentioned the 50% of the performance fee incentive.

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Very well put together and easy to read and understand. The team and this project got my full support. :innocent: :ok_hand:

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So did I :slight_smile:

Hi. I seem to have an issue with staking on the app. Can I speak to anyone about this?

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There are currently some UI issues and the team is working on a fix. In the meantime you can use this tool to stake or unstake. https://vfat.tools/badger/

I suggest you hop into the discord server, there is a lot of support there if you need any assistance. :+1:

5 Likes

1st
The Badger developer pool at 15% of total supply is really exciting and a great incentive indeed, I think that’s a very smart move.
2nd COVER being cheap is really great for lps so incentives to cover should be a no brainer too.
3 Spadaboom said it all else and I could not agree more.
Oh i also think the vault rewards for Badger stakers should be / stay in Badgers instead of any other coin as that keeps constant buying pressure on the coin and helps in maintaining a mkre leveled price.
Cheers Badgers

1 Like

Great outline. Focusing on security and operations will build a strong foundation for innovating Bitcoin products, so looking very much forward to when that phase kicks off.

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yo max didn’t know you were around :eyes: look forward to having your input :slight_smile:

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I agree on the large bounty. Small bug bounties are almost a virtue signal vs a security measure.

I’m personally really excited for the bounty board. It’s going to be fun pitching in and watching others do the same. Keep up the great work team!